Shush

I think it is pretty safe to say, that I am the loudest person in the library. Not that a lot of people are willing to step up and interject that they have in fact beat me, because well being a disturbance is rarely the subject of a boast.

Of course the library attracts all kinds of freaks: the illiterate druggie teenagers trying to slip into their tutor’s pants, the snot encrusted four year olds that misdiagnose the animals in the pictures, the overstressed students whispering their notes to themselves as they fall asleep in them, the hunched and shrunken librarians sighing at their back pain and shushing at everything else, the senile men looking for bingo, the people who arrived early a little too early for the AA meeting, the bird experts giving lectures on what nothing of importance, and then there is me.

Just trying to tiptoe across the indoor/outdoor carpet and do just that—get in and then get out—as quickly and quietly as possible. Nevertheless I am the worst kind of loud. From the rain outside, my sneakers squeak across the tile in the lobby. When I reach the double doors, they open with the echo of a castle gate. Although the rug slightly silences my feet, I walk into a table and as if they were planes, I send pamphlets floating through the air. Each time I knock something off a shelf or drop my purse, everyone looks up and stairs like I clapped my hands and created an avalanche. I smile politely and duck behind the nearest bookcase, but because everyone else around me wants a reason to take a break from whatever dry book is in front of them, they still stare at that spot as if waiting for me to reappear.

When I pause to scan the bindings for something blatant, my ankle bones cracks. When I reach for one item, I nudge the remanding dominos over. When I check out, the scanner beeps the loudest and the woman pounds on the keyboard like an instrument, but only when she takes care of me.

Sometimes I have this daydream, where I am wearing big combat boots and I stomp into the library, my mouth a siren belting “John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith.” But that is just something I like to think about.

Every time I strode towards the door, I half expected them to flip the open sign to closed, shaking their heads, wondering how someone so small could make so much noise. At five feet tall I projected five times the sound I should have. I tried going to the library when it was busy and when it was empty, but never really decided which was worse. They both sucked.

In almost any other environment, like at the mall or in the post office, you could set off a cherry bomb and everyone would be too preoccupied with themselves to so much as make an extra blink at your expense. Something about the library just brings out the nosey in every busybody. Even the most private hermit will perk a rabbit ear at a floorboards creek. Like the silence is so thick it has dusted over, until my movement anger the cobwebs.

If I could have I would have opted out of the library, but reading books off the computer poses two problems. The first being, of course Tetris; I can get there in three clicks and play for three hours without blinking before I realize I have yet to open to book file I downloaded. The second is a comfort thing. I need to be able to bend paperbacks, making the binding a cylinder, stretch out on my back and read until my eyes insist on shutting.

Trying not to read worked very well for a while, just like when I quit biting my fingernails and tried not to tell anymore lies. For that while, it was wonderful, but one day I got an itch and needed to book binge. When I was walking to the car, a pile of books as high as my chin cradled in my arms, I ran into this gay kid Zach.

“Fancy seeing you here. You look too funny, little girl, big books” his hand flopped and he kept walking while my tower of Pizza collapsed all over the ground.

On a semi-spring day, I attempted to be sleuth and as usual, failed miserably. Because today my purse strap had broken, and everything from my cell phone to the bouncy ball I carried for good luck and the collection of change I pick up off the ground splattered across the floor, I was staking it out in the very far back shelves, at least until someone of the witnesses departed.

Normally I browse the fiction section, but on this end, my haste sent me to reference, which of course does no real good, because those are uncheckoutable. Obviously, with my noise condition, I cannot read book in the library and for the sake of everyone else, I would never dare to attempt to make photocopies. I cannot really recall a time before that I had ended up in the lost temple of reference, and if I had I would had left immediately.

Among the gnarled volumes of encyclopedias and almanacs, hid a narrow and well abused paperback. Had I not chosen that direction to space off in, it probably would have remained glued in the canon of paper until the building burned down. The cover used to have a picture on it but water damage had warped whatever it was into a grey coaster. Due to its prolonged forgottence, its leaves were practically sealed together; unbending and inserting a paperclip, I managed to dislodge enough to discover in my hands I held Fitzgerald’s now fallen Great Gatsby.

Someone with a green pen once read what I held, because they left passages circled and stared and noted. On the blank page to the right of the author’s bio on the last page it ink read “If all else fails, just let it be known that all I wanted was to get out my paragraph—LG.”

I was about to go check out my new find, but something about that felt wrong. If I formally brought Gatsby to the counter, I would be asking permission to borrow what I had discovered. Not only that, but I would have to return it in two weeks. I wanted to claim ownership, so I slipped it in my back pocket.

For a moment it felt like I had gone deaf, as I walked towards the exit, my shoes were muffled and I knocked nothing over. Hearing someone sneeze and another voice reply “bless you,” I knew that my ears were not deceiving me. Noiselessly I strode out of the library like a statistic.

That was the first time I had ever stolen anything. I had to ponder whether it counted as theft, but since I did not own the book and I did not ask permission to take it and I did not intend on bringing it back, I could not loophole myself out of it. Upon discovering what I did, I felt even better. I felt damn good. I felt badass.

Four days later when I lifted a pack of gum out of the 711, I felt just as good. Not that I even chew gum, it kind of grosses me out. It reminds me of in the summer when the tar softens and sometimes melts to my flip-flop.

I took the book, because I felt possessive of it. I took the gum to see if I could and to see if it felt the same. It did. In the weeks later, I tested my limits swiping fresh baked waffles off the neighbors counter and drill bits from Home Depot. For a challenge I made the microwave in the teacher’s lounge disappear, during school hours. Turns out, I had talents other than being loud. As I had never before known what it was like to be silent, I need to discover my limits.

When I proposed to research how inspirational The Great Gatsby is to youth my English teacher replied, “I like that, explore it.” Little did she know I was talking about the microwave incident.

Now, dear friend, do you want to stand there, and question where this car came from, or do you want to see where this road goes?

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